The funny thing about the whole Penny Arcade / PAX / Dickwolves / What The Fuck Happened deal is that it's great seeing exactly what people are taking away from it all. And by "it all", by the way, I mean "whatever part of the ongoing story they wish to focus on and ignore the rest." The sad reality of the situation is that far too many people are trying to minimize things so that they can.
Before I get too far into this, let me give people the obligatory link for those who have not followed this so closely. PS, if you think "This is about that WoW comic forever ago, right?", then you qualify as someone who has not followed this pretty much at all. Anyway, here's this -
http://debacle.tumblr.com/post/3041940865/the-pratfall-of-penny-arcade-a-timeline
It links to a timeline of events and is attempting "neutrality", but when you've named your article in this manner, you sort've lose that out of the gate. That being said, it's pretty thorough. As a matter of fact, it's down to minutiae so thin that I actually appear indirectly twice on that list. Once for participation in the Gamers With Jobs forum thread referenced - and it's not even the longest or most detailed thread there regarding this particular deal. Once again because I (years ago) established the group called Dickwolves of Austin on Facebox. More on that in a minute.
I've been told no good story starts with the phrase "what happened was..." So, what happened was Penny Arcade ran that comic we're all familiar with and there was some backlash. Some of the backlash was reasonable and measured. Some of it was just hollering stupidity generally reserved for the Internet's Anger Bandwagon once the band on said wagon begins playing a screed at someone. At the time, my takeaway was pretty much this - yes, rape culture is a thing. No, this comic is not the goddamned Devil. Yes, it is worth noting that this comic is probably a low-level part of the problem. No, it seemed like few people were actually saying that.
Everyone rushes to have their goddamned teaching moments, which usually break down thusly: "You are ignorant, and I am trying to enlighten you, slob.... why are you angry at me, cave man? Oh, it must be my massive intellect and empathy that you cannot fathom. Feh!" Naturally, there was a lot of this. Frankly, on both sides: We had the people trying to enlighten Mike and Jerry while looking down their nose at them, and we then had the counter-enlighteners attempt to roll their eyes and explain why their relaxed, not-so-wound-up-PC-bullshit viewpoint was truly what the world needed.
For my part, I thought it was funny. So I went on Facebox and used the name for a social group for some gaming locals to coordinate this, that, and the other. It was a gaming joke, we needed a team name, and not too shortly after, the T-Shirts started rolling out. It seemed to fit, and to me, it was a reminder of what happens when people just start taking their shit way too seriously.
Of course, what rolled out with (and before) this was Mike going out into the Internet and explaining to everyone how he wasn't a bad guy and that they were overreacting. And by that, I mean he was visiting blogs and firing off Tweets just directly attempting to troll the fuck out of anyone who might notice them. There's a problem that crept into the discourse that I didn't notice until later - this was, in its own way, an interesting example of something people don't understand about rape or rape culture: power is discounted by the powerful. Mike, feeling cornered and bullied, lashed out while he (intentionally at points, but not at others) rallied others to his cause. I mean, there's endless hordes of people who get told their "hilarious" joke about women or black people or gays should probably be not said. Among those people, there are many who feel like they're being cornered and bullied by PC culture, just as Mike did.
Mike, by the way, has millions of fans. Those people who felt bullied share the views of a vast majority. Mike, in this equation, was able to say a few things and summon a ravening horde of people to tell the complainers to shut up. Their views were not welcome. And so on. Summon Dire Dickwolf VI, I suppose, opting for the ability to get a bunch rather than just one.
So this is how things started - the first few steps. The problem that emerged immediately is that those who made this about the comic missed an important step. It wasn't about the comic, not really. It was about the problem such brazen jokes about rape contributes to. It was also about picking your battles - people constantly decried "this was just a run of the mill comic, they make jokes like this all the time." Well, if this was so run of the mill, why did the PA folks decide to pick this particular battle? At this point they were the ones who made it an exception when they made a follow up comic belittling and straw-manning the complaints and releasing the shirt about it, rather than just shrugging off the criticism they deal with on an ongoing basis.
So, lesson 1 here is pick your goddamned battles.
Lesson 2 is a matter of reality checking certain things. As this went on and then morphed into Mike going on to make fun of transgender people (and then, once again, attacking those who felt insulted and mocked), there was another ongoing narrative evolving. Set beside the boring, beaten-to-death mantra of "Oh, just loosen up! You're so PC! /eyeroll" was emerging the defense that Mike and Jerry were just regular guys so why did anything they say have any impact, anyway?
Guess what, folks. You can make an online comic about your self created avatars. You can put your names out there as game reviewers many people wish to hear from. You can create an online community and then a real live one (PAX!, which I attended the first one) where you are treated like celebrities. You can then create a web series that is pretty much you all the time, and then several more where it's you dealing with other people.
But, after all that, you cannot try to giggle and duck your head and try to pretend you're just "some guys" no one should listen to. Or rather, I suppose you can. But then you're just being intellectually dishonest. Or, at best, you're being kinda dumb. In neither case are you correct.
It was about this time where I became certain I didn't really back the right horse, here. Mike was obviously just going on a bro-ass rampage, and Jerry was being pretty silent. At this point I wondered what was going on in Jerry's head, and I wondered about Robert Khoo, their business director. Were these guys just causing him nightmares left and right?
We got our answer recently, when the third hit in this Triforce of Children's Behavior finally made itself known. In this year's PAX, Robert got on stage with Jerry and Mike to host one of the best attended events in the con - just the three of them chatting about PA and stuff. You know, no idea why people think those two have anything interesting to say or why Jerry or Mike might think people want to hear from them. Anyway. Robert asks if there's anything they regret, and taking the look of a young, downtrodden hero underdog in the novel of his life, Mike says they should have never stopped the Dickwolves shirts.
I am not a sorcerer, but I feel like I get what he meant. We should have never let them bully us and push us around. And I'm going to say this in a way that evokes a man quietly and nobly standing up for unpopular ideals!
This, of course, resonated with the crowd, which went wild. YOU TELL 'EM, STEVEDAVE, on an epic scale. Poor Mike, a man with a small media empire and adulation of hundreds of thousands, allowed someone to make a sound business and moral decision for him - a decision that he, at the time, said he was behind and he was totally learning from his mistakes about. He couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to be right.
And that's the problem with how we discuss matters like this. People don't want to learn. People don't want to show empathy or understand. They want to be right. They want it to be a fight, and they want to be on the team that's the badasses! So, instead of trying to look at the actual problem and filter out the noise, we have people who embrace the noise. They HAVE to have the noise, because they can fight that noise. Who cares that people made articulate, reasonable comments about the situation. Fuck that! Let's focus on the slobbering idiots that everyone knows are slobbering idiots. Can we focus on those, please? I just want to address the idiots, now, so that I have an easy target and we can pretend there are only idiots. Great.
Thankfully, someone offered up this piece to encapsulate the whole thing -
http://webegeekspc.com/editorial-people-ethical-treatment-dickwolves/
This is perfect. It's self-righteousness wrapped up in the "I don't care if what I say is mean, it's true!" smugness. It's blended with a large dose of false equivocation because, well... this man takes some assumptions about what people are saying vs what they really think and then goes from there. It's one thing to guess, but the whole premise of this is, "I can see into your mind, checkmate."
Folks like this are part of the problem. They want the fight, because to them any backlash is simply justification.
Of course, the "other side is just as bad!" Naturally. There were rape and death threats towards the PA guys and their family. Unequivocally bad. But the problem with the "everyone's wrong, in their own way" bullshit is that such statements are just shortcuts for making the issue no longer about the problem. It's not the problem we're talking about now, it's trying to pretend there's not really a problem and oh hey aren't I just so emotionally balanced and enlightened? But, sure, both "sides" have done something wrong.
Who the flying fuck cares about that? This is not a team sport, people. What's important is that people need to understand what the actual problem is. Can we discuss that? No? Fine... I mean, sure. We can't talk about the problem. Because there is a problem, and this whole arc really explains it very well. "Shut up about rape. We don't wanna hear it. You don't really have a problem, you're just making it up in your head. It's not all that bad. Oh god, not this PC bullcrap again. Sure rape happens, but this isn't the way or place to talk about it. What is the way or place to talk about it? I dunno, but let me be clear - I get to decide, not you."
And that is pretty much it. That's the crux of the "Pro-Dickwolf" thing, which - by the way - is not actually a thing. Pro-Dickwolf means nothing. This isn't about a comic, sorry! Not anymore. If it were still about a comic, this would probably be pretty silly, so I can see why people are desperately clinging to that notion. But this turned into a couple of guys using their voice and power to purport that people with much smaller voices and much less power were bullying them. If you can grasp that, then you grasp the real problem as a wider issue. Someone complains, and the tables are turned on the complainer rather than the person who has caused offense or damage.
I don't personally care if people want to boycott PAX or not. I already own a Dickwolf shirt, so I guess the "damage" in that regard is done. I'm not going to burn it or anything, because it's a reminder, still, of what happens when people take their shit and themselves way too seriously. However, really, it's not the same people that reminder started off with. Instead of learning something, everyone instead saw "WE ARE BEING ATTACKED. QUICK, FORM A GROUP TO FEEL LIKE IT'S A WAR FOR SOCIAL VALUES OR SOMETHING" rather than just skimming over the information and trying to learn something.
While the cries for boycotts and righteous screams for these guys' heads irritate me to no end, I find it less offensive than the people who try to pretend that they're some last ragged band of downtrodden heroes fighting against the PC Police or something. Mike and Jerry are the ones with power, here, and they have abused it in a fantastic fashion, over the course of this whole event. We get very wrapped up in trying to be contrarian (another shortcut for trying to look smart) when people claim injury or offense, and in that rush we forget that someone started it. PA was wrong to begin with, because while perhaps you can argue the comic was harmless, so was the response. Who did it hurt for people to say, "I think Penny Arcade promotes rape culture" when the people saying it were talking to themselves and had blogs with audiences numbering in the maybe-hundreds. Who did it hurt? Then who did it hurt when Mike went out of his way to mock and belittle those people on that and many later occasions. When PA as a group followed up with the comic that equated comments about rape culture to stating "You are making rapists!", a straw man so ludicrous that I'm shocked someone like Jerry let it go. They literally became the thing people were accusing them of at that point. And that's really all there is to it.
I mean, what I'm saying here is that I need a new name for my Facebox group.
But the steeled eye, the tight jaw, say it all.
The white paint, the plastic saints, say it all.
Somebody has got to say it all.
